The Scarlet Letter

The scarlet letter carries many different meanings throughout the novel, but its most obvious significance is as a symbol of Hester’s relationship to society. This is of course what the magistrates had in mind when they sentenced her to wear it; at the most literal level, the A stands for “adulteress,” marking Hester as someone who has placed herself outside the strict Christian community of Salem by violating one of the Ten Commandments. From the moment she begins to wear it, then, Hester is estranged from the rest of society: “Every gesture, every word, and even the silence of those with whom she came in contact, implied, and often expressed, that she was banished, and as much alone as if she inhabited another sphere” (76). What’s more, to the extent that society does recognize Hester, it strips her of her unique personhood, asking her to “giv[e] up her individuality […] [and] become the general symbol at which the preacher and moralist might point” (71).

As extreme as Hester’s isolation and dehumanization are, however, they’re emblematic of a basic aspect of human experience: the gap between an individual’s public and private personas, and the sense of alienation that can result from it. This split is apparent even in the Introduction; the narrator finds his work at the Custom House frustrating largely because its repetitive, bureaucratic nature clashes with his sense of himself as a curious and creative person. However, in a society like 17th-century Salem, the division between public and private selves can be much wider and therefore much more painful. As a Puritan theocracy, Salem society considers the inner moral character of its members an appropriate area for legislation. What’s more, the Puritan belief in predestination—the idea that God has preselected some people for salvation and the rest for damnation—tends to encourage attempts to read the state of a person’s soul into their public persona. According to this line of thinking, the “elect” are identifiable based on the way they act and comport themselves; in other words, a person’s inner self will inevitably manifest publicly.

Of course, a government can’t control every aspect of its citizens’ inner lives. For that reason, The Scarlet Letter suggests that the ultimate tendency of these laws and beliefs is simply to encourage hypocrisy. This is the crux of Dimmesdale’s problem: He lacks the courage to reveal his “true” inner self, but he views the divide between it and his public identity as a kind of deception, and thus as a sin in and of itself. As a result, he cannot even console himself with the knowledge of his many good works; on the contrary, each one only widens the gap between who he feels he is and who he appears to be. This is why, when Hester argues that Dimmesdale’s public life is as much a “reality” as his guilty secret, he objects so vehemently: “There is no substance in it! It is cold and dead, and can do nothing for me!” (167). Dimmesdale can only find peace by revealing the truth about his affair in the very public setting of the marketplace scaffold.

The novel doesn’t share the Puritan suspicion of private life and identity; notably, in the moment of Dimmesdale’s confession, the narrator focuses not on the spectacle of Dimmesdale revealing his own “red stigma” but on the minister’s emotional experience of “triumph” (221). Likewise, in the Introduction, Hawthorne mentions the need to “keep the inmost Me behind its veil” (7) even while discussing semiautobiographical events. Even as it defends the importance of the private self, however, the narrative also acknowledges the necessity of grappling with one’s public identity. Hester’s story arc is a good example of this: The extremely negative public view of Hester never fully aligns with her own sense of herself, but she finds a way to put her shame to good use, using her identity as an outcast to empathize with and comfort others. She’s so successful in this that public opinion shifts in response, with even the letter itself becoming “the token, not of that one sin, for which she had borne so long and dreary a penance, but of her many good deeds since” (142). This is in part why the narrator urges readers to “Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred” (224); by working within the bounds of even a negative public image, it’s possible to bring it into closer alignment with one’s inner sense of self.

From the beginning, the ostracism Hester experiences is inextricably tied to her gender. Although Dimmesdale is just as guilty of adultery, his crime can’t be physically proven in the same way that Hester’s can; her pregnancy, and later the mere existence of her daughter Pearl, constitute tangible proof that she was unfaithful to her husband. What’s more, Western culture has historically punished women’s sexual indiscretions more harshly than men’s. This was particularly true of the context in which Hawthorne was writing; the 19th century tolerated men’s pre- or extramarital affairs as a supposedly natural function of male sexuality but made few allowances for women who violated the “innate” female virtue of chastity. Although The Scarlet Letter takes place roughly two centuries earlier, these 19th-century norms inform scenes like the one in which several women lament that they themselves couldn’t pass judgment on Hester: “This woman has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die” (49). The unspoken assumption here and elsewhere is that Hester’s gender makes her actions particularly unconscionable.

However, the novel is clearly critical of this view. If anything, Hawthorne depicts Hester as Dimmesdale’s moral superior; while Dimmesdale behaves hypocritically by giving into impulses he believes to be wrong, Hester’s actions are largely consistent with her internal sense of what is right. The novel also depicts this private moral code sympathetically, even as it flies in the face of traditional views of female sexuality. Although Hester does express remorse for betraying her husband, she also suggests that her love for Dimmesdale has its own moral justifications or even obligations; she describes her affair with Dimmesdale as “[having] a consecration of its own” (170), implying that the relationship was in its own way pure and holy. Hawthorne’s use of maternal (rather than sexual) imagery in his descriptions of Hester’s interactions with Dimmesdale is significant as well. Motherhood was central to 19th-century female gender norms and was often depicted as a sacred calling. In describing Dimmesdale approaching Hester with “the wavering effort of an infant, with its mother’s arms in view” (218), the narrator draws on these cultural associations to render Hester and Dimmesdale’s relationship more sympathetic.

Questions of adultery aside, the novel also devotes significant attention to the problem of women’s overall position in society. Hester considers women’s current status intolerable and believes that only the total reorganization of society and a shift in both male and female attitudes can remedy the situation. The novel doesn’t specify the change that would “establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness” (227), but given Hawthorne’s personal experience with utopian communities like Brook Farm, it may be referencing the 19th-century free love movement. Proponents of disentangling love from marriage often argued that marriage was an inherently sexist institution that treated women as property. However, Hawthorne ultimately suggests that Hester’s ideas are too radical for her time and circumstances: “Earlier in life, Hester had vainly imagined that she herself might be the destined prophetess, but had long since recognized the impossibility that any mission of divine and mysterious truth should be confided to a woman stained with sin” (227-28).